Mother Box and Other Tales (15 page)

Mary stood in the middle of the river and looked. She knew where it was, right there under the white bridge that crossed the river just beyond the old mill house. Right there, in the shadow where the crisp white pylon was cut by the dark water. But it was not there. There was nothing there but the pylon, the sandy bank, the river. Still. Mary was certain. It was suffering her gaze. It was breathing in apprehension. It was poised to rush—which way? toward her? poised to spring? It was waiting for her next move which would have to be so deliberate, her most carefully balanced move to date. What would it be? This test, which she had always anticipated, had come upon her so suddenly, when she was so preoccupied with other considerations. On paper, it might appear that Mary was in the worst possible state to accept such a challenge, but, she thought, perhaps after all this was the only state in which such challenges could be proffered. Her dress fluttered forward between her legs, caught in the breeze of the river. It was important to articulate herself as both predator and prey; it was important to indicate the hard kernel of self that had never
before been breached. Mary mustered all her resources. The fly buzzed furiously, each bristle erect. There was nothing there; she was sure. “Dr. Bledsoe?” she said and flung out her hand.

Fifteen years later, Mary sat in a wicker chair looking down the long slope of her yard to the creek where her children were playing. It was late summer, the land booming at the height of its hollow greenness. Some time earlier, Mary had slipped off her shoes and she wiggled her toes in the grass and considered the experience, as she always did, less satisfactory than the idea of the experience which conveniently elided the fact of insect life, now making itself known by crawling across her feet with the most unpleasant lack of surprise. As if every day great, pale mountains came out of the sky to sit heavily on their fertile fields. As if there was no longer anything under the sun that could elicit the awe of a grasshopper.

An ant crossed Mary's toenail and she flicked her foot so briskly it flew off and landed what must have seemed an unfathomable distance away in the grass next to the coffee tin Terry had filled with ice for her. Mary sipped her drink. Her children were singing some sort of a song together. It didn't seem as if Terry knew the words, but Irma, who was patient and stolid, was repeating the song phrase by phrase so he could mimic her. Mary couldn't see the children, but heard them splashing and singing and every now and then caught a glimpse of their bodies as they crossed before a break in the trees.

Probably they were swimming naked again. It seemed likely from both her prior knowledge of their proclivities and the amount of skin she saw flashing in between the weighty limbs of the cottonwood and river birch. This bothered Charlie to no end, particularly now that Irma was older and Terry, a long, bronze, ill-tempered boy, had acquired all the physical heraldry of a man.
Mary supposed it should bother her, too. After all, she was there with them, day after day, season after season. If someone was tasked with instilling in the children an appropriate wrath toward their bodies, it was most likely to be her, their mother, who had rolled them from nits to full, pearly skeletons in the tumbler of her womb, but Mary could not bring herself to do so. “Let them wallow in it. For awhile more,” Mary said to no one. There was no one there. Not even a garden, which was tucked up around the skirts of the house in neatly demarcated beds Charlie paid a gardening service to weed and prune and turn. Around Mary was nothing but the swale of clipped grasses and the sky which seemed to come closer and closer every year. The tree line started on her side of the creek and extended beyond it all the way to the highway which was barely visible, a shining scar slashed along the flank of the nearest foothill, and Mary wasn't sure if the droning she was hearing was from the distant cars or a chant of the insects or some other kind of effect originating from inside her own ears and radiating out.

Mary finished her drink and set it on the wide, wooden arm of the chair. She closed her eyes and watched the hot pattern the sun made against her eyelids. Mary was forty-five. For the past eight years, since Irma's birth, the fly had been a leaden pea within her chest, utterly still. She supposed this meant it had finally acceded to the natural order of things, the body finally triumphing over the will; yet, the fly didn't feel dead to her. It felt as if it were in hibernation. It felt acquiescent. Regardless, she supposed she no longer needed the measures she and Charlie had implemented to keep the fly in check when it became too frivolous with its use of her resources, but they were a habit, part of a routine toward which she felt some responsibility. She went on.

Often, Mary was resting. This was the word they all used around the house. She didn't know what her children might say
of her when they were outside of the house, and she didn't consider it her business. Outside the house, her children wore pants and shoes. They opened their fat pretty mouths and out spilled the most banal and complicated things, like hurky monkeys which clapped their cymbals to no discernable rhythm. Mary knew this was true, though she had hardly ever witnessed it. She was not so far gone, she considered, pouring herself another drink, that she did not know the ways in which the world ordered itself. For example, she could stand up right now and walk down the slope after which she could reasonably expect herself to arrive at the creek. There she could tell her children, who would be arcing from the water like otters or some other creature that makes full utility of its skin, to gather up the garments they have left in a heap on the bank and clothe themselves, each arm through an arm hole, each leg through the hole that has been sewn to fit a leg. It was even likely that the children would do so—they were fond of her in a distant, jovial way—but to what purpose? This was something Mary often asked herself. To what purpose was the earth?

The ghost arrived from somewhere in the direction of the driveway and sat in the grass at Mary's side. “Hello,” the ghost said, and when Mary didn't respond she pulled a blade of grass from the ground and made a little whistle of it which she blew with grating regularity as she looked around her. Clearly, Mary had forgotten something. She felt as if she had just embarked on a long trip only to recall some important piece of identification which might be in her wallet or might be tucked in the pocket of her winter coat, hung tidily in the hall closet. Either way, to look would set something resolutely in motion, would define, in any contingency, a certain lack. Mary kept her eyes resolutely forward.

The last time Mary had seen the ghost was her last morning at the facility on which she had awoken on the floor of her cottage amidst a heap of bedding and meditation pillows. Impelled
by some unfathomed instinct, she had immediately risen and walked, still shoeless, still in her damp dress, toward the dining hall where she discovered something had occurred in her absence. There had been a fire, a grievous one. It had swept through the floors of the Have-Nots' dormitory in the last hours of the night, perhaps bursting into its first blue spark even as she, Mary, was winding her way back from the garden. There were many casualties. Though the fire was now out, as Mary stumbled up behind Donovan and August and Pete who were standing in a loose circle, turned partially away from the scene but still craning to look, she could see the smolder of the building rising hot against the sky. There was a smell. There was a high buzzing whine that seemed to be spilling out of many people's mouths at once. A woman in a purple nightdress sat on one of the railroad ties that defined the parking lot and rubbed her singed hair off her head in clumps. A fireman knelt in the damp gravel and tugged something straight beneath a sheet. Mary did not see Dr. Bledsoe, though she looked for him, but she did see the ghost who was standing in the shade of an apple tree, her hands clasped between her breasts as if holding some small, imprisoned creature. The ghost's mouth was slack and heavy. She was watching, avariciously, Mary thought, as the fireman turned the waning flow of their hoses on this sooty pile, on that steaming beam, in a final wavering line around the base of the gutted building, before cranking off the water and coiling the hoses for storage.

“Look at that,” Mary said, but Donovan and August and Pete all continued to look at whatever detail of the scene had originally caught their attention. There was a brown clog lying on its side next to a puddle of greasy water. There was a sunny yellow curtain, entirely intact, snapping through the blackened frame of a window. The boys were like pillars of salt, struck into crumbling particularity, and they did not acknowledge her. When she
put her hand on August's arm she felt him vibrating beneath her touch like something that had been wound very tightly and then kept from moving. Dr. Throng, wearing jeans and an unflattering orange silk pajama top, was running back and forth along the path between the dormitory and the dining hall talking on her cell phone. The hand not holding the phone was clenched perfectly still at her side. Donovan said, “The fools, the idiots,” but he was not talking to her and, when she followed the line of his gaze, he seemed to be staring at the goat barn, through the windows of which the heads of the four nannies could be seen racketing about, the animals struck into a hereditary terror by the smell of the charred wood. There were five sheets covering uneven shapes laid before the building. Pete was flushed and kept sticking his fingers into his mouth as if perhaps he had burned them. There was a yellow warbler which perched briefly on a car antenna and then sprung away, warbling. There was something on the ground, a lump of something on the ground which was black and maroon and seemed to leak. There was the river, unperturbed, winking in and out of sight between the line of ambulances and fire trucks.

Later that day, Charlie, who had caught an inconvenient flight and hired a driver at the airport, came to pick her up. All of the resident's emergency contacts had been called. Cars were parked in untidy clusters before all the buildings and men and women in an array of hastily contrived outfits were leading their parents, or spouses, or grown, unreliable children around by the wrists, or standing with their hands cupped around their mouths, shouting names into the calamitous air. Charlie looked tired, but also somehow fresh. He was doing something different with his hair, wearing it longer over his forehead which lessened the severity of his mournful eyes. The car parked on the white bridge, as close as it could get to the crowded scene, and Charlie and the driver carried her bags from her cottage, all the way around the
barn and greenhouse, through the muddy sward surrounding the dining hall and extant dormitory and set them at her feet beside the car.

The driver was a tall man with crisp, tightly curled hair. He was distracted by the scene and stood for a minute on the bridge, shaking his head and whistling silently between his teeth as he took it in. Mary thought how strange it was that this was likely all she would ever know of the driver: his haircut and his habits of surprise. It didn't seem enough, though she supposed what else was there? Charlie too stood looking over the side of the bridge, though he kept away from the railing as if he feared anything he touched would wipe off on his clothes. No one seemed to notice her. She brushed her hands against her dress and noticed for the first time that it was the plum dress, one of her favorites, very beguiling in the way it plunged at the neck and flowed at the thigh. She felt a little dizzy.

Charlie looks like a flower blooming just before the frost, Mary thought and then she was annoyed with herself for having made such a topical analogy. Still, once thought the image stuck. Bloom before doom, Bloom before doom, she thought with an irritating shrillness. She was probably coming undone. It could be excused. After all, there had been a tragedy. Mary considered that she needed a drink and, as she waited for the driver and Charlie to finish loading her bags, found that this was exactly the sort of car in which drinks were provided. There were even plastic cocktail stirrers in an array of jewel-tone colors; little plastic swords and others that were topped with little plastic daisies. The fly came up to the very top of her throat and into her mouth where it tapped against the backs of her teeth, but would not or could not exit. Mary stirred her drink with an emerald sword and watched the landscape slide away around her. The car was fast and smooth and seemed to travel with a fierce possessiveness. From where she sat,
Mary could see the back of the driver's black head over the top of Charlie's blond one.

Everything was in such opposition it was hard to feel like a whole person. Black head, blond head. Mountain, river. Even when Mary closed her eyes, there was the fly, scrubbing its face at the back of her tongue, confused, battered. Even with her eyes closed, she knew when the world around her lurched into motion—the moment when it gathered itself into hallucinatory precision and then slipped away.

Mary had been so preoccupied with the car and the drink and the sharp emerald sword which she now used to prick her finger, that she had taken no last look behind her, had said goodbye to no one. She had just left. Swallowed up like nothing other than herself standing in her own body on the great, hot tongue of a giant. So this was how it had gone, Mary thought and sucked the swelling drop of blood from off her finger. It tasted like pine, but probably she had slopped some gin on her finger. That was probably the only explanation.

“You were in no real danger?” Charlie said, leaning forward and putting a hand on her knee. “You're all still in one piece?”

Charlie's hand was warm and sloppy and large. It enveloped her knee which, she realized, was looking a little rackety. She still wasn't wearing any shoes and her feet against the impeccable floor mats looked like little animals turned out of their skins.

“I'm pretty tired,” Mary said to her husband. She felt she was admitting to something else entirely. She felt the release of confession.

“I bet,” Charlie said, walloping her knee in a friendly gesture. He lurched across the space between them and settled next to her, tucked her under his arm so her head rested in his armpit where she could smell his thin, clean cologne. “I hope none of those ones were anyone you knew,” Charlie said, looking out the other
window, his hand pressed over Mary's ear so his voice came to her as if through the chambers of a shell.